Stating the Obvious

Over at the Grauniad, Matt Stoller notes that Facebook in general, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular, has been operating as a criminal enterprise for since its founding.

When one looks at the social media giant's history of deception, and Zuckerberg's history of shady dealings with business associates, it does seem that criminality is a part of its core.

That being said, Stoller is right that much of this is more of an indictment of lax enforcement and regulatory capture:

Facebook is having a rough go of it these days, so you might expect the company to be in trouble. For instance, at one Senate judiciary hearing, the Republican senator John Kennedy of Louisiana let Facebook’s Colin Stretch have it.

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Yet if you don’t recognize this particularly exchange, it’s because it happened more than three years ago, before the whistleblower du jour, Frances Haugen, even joined Facebook. And in the time since that hearing, the company’s stock has doubled.

Indeed, Facebook was born, lives and thrives in scandal. There were scandals before this hearing, such as violations of privacy that led to a Federal Trade Commission consent decree in 2012. There were scandals after this hearing, such as Facebook being exposed as facilitating a genocide in Myanmar. In 2019, the US government fined Facebook $5bn for violating its commitment to the government to stop deceiving its users over their ability to control the privacy of their personal information. In 2020, the House antitrust subcommittee revealed documents showing Mark Zuckerberg as explicitly predatory in his business methods, which were supplemented by the Federal Trade Commission complaint filed earlier this year. And yet, we see almost no action of consequence.

So forgive me, as a longtime critic of Facebook, for not seeing this latest round of bad press – which reveals nothing we don’t already know – as not getting to the heart of the problem.

That problem is simple. Lawlessness pays. We’ve known that Facebook is lawless and reckless for years. And yet despite all the light and heat, Facebook is still a globe-straddling monopoly over our information commons. One man is still in charge of it, making all key policy decisions, and he is worth $100bn and considered an important leader and philanthropist. To put it differently, when a bank robber robs a bank, blame the bank robber. When a bank robber robs 20 banks, and announces where he’s going to steal from next, and does it in broad daylight, repeatedly, and no one stops him, we should be blaming the cops. And that’s where we are with Facebook.

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And this brings us to the reason we haven’t done anything about Facebook. In order to actually address the problem of dominant market power and conflicts of interest, we the people would have to empower our government to govern. We’d have to pass laws strengthening antitrust enforcement, we’d have to bar corporate conflicts of interest such as a communications firm vertically integrated into an advertising network, and we’d have to restore the rule of law against the powerful when they commit crimes.

Doing so is necessary, and long overdue. And policymakers are moving in that direction. In New York, for instance, state lawmakers are debating an abuse-of-dominance bill that would ramp up antitrust enforcement. At the FTC, enforcers are considering using new regulatory tools to address unfair methods of competition. In Ohio, the attorney general is using public utility law to take on big tech. At some point, hopefully, enforcers will even use criminal law and put handcuffs on powerful lawbreakers.

Yes, frog-march them out of their offices in handcuffs.

I really want to see these guys frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs.